Kushinagar, eastern UP: Jhaliya is sitting outside her hut with her savings spread before her. Twenty-five kilograms of dhan or unpolished rice, painstakingly gathered over three months of foraging in the fields. She has dug out each grain from the burrows of field rats at night after working in the fields through the day.

Jhaliya is a musahar, the poorest caste of dalits who inhabit eastern UP. Traditionally rat trappers, poverty has ensured that their association with this creature continues. Again because there is no employment outside of agriculture here, no industry or construction activity, when Jhaliya was offered two kilograms of rice for eight hours of backbreaking labour, she had no choice but to accept it. In the winter months even this work dries up. To survive she must steal from the rats; like many others in the village.

Jhaliya is very matter of fact about her situation. ‘I will start looking for work when it finishes,’ she tells me, ‘and if I don’t get work I will have to starve.’

She is more fortunate than her neighbour Indarpatiya, about whose death I had read in a local newspaper published from Gorakhpur. The report said that she died of starvation; the administration claimed it was tuberculosis. By the time I reached Badauli, Indarpatiya’s mother Jyotiya had arrived to look after her four grandchildren, the oldest of whom is fourteen. According to her, ever since Indarpatiya’s husband died three years ago, she ate less and less to keep her children from going hungry. She insists that had her daughter eaten well, she would have been able to fight the disease.

‘In how many days did the family eat?’

‘Once in two or three days. They ate if someone gave them some food, because Indarpatiya was too weak to go out and work.’

Jyotiya does not know what will happen to her grandchildren. She has received no official help so far, except Rs 200 for cremating her daughter. But what is more worrying is that there is nothing to eat in the house except one sack of grain. ‘How long will it last,’ she asks.

As I leave the village, I see a row of clay urns, meant for storing grain. They are large, visible and completely empty. But every family has at least one.

‘So what’s the use of having them.’ I want to know. ‘No one will marry their daughters to our boys,’ say the villagers. ‘They will think we can’t provide for them. Who will take a ladder and peep to see what’s inside when the marriage is being fixed? That’s why we have them in a prominent place.’ A bit like the government’s food for work programme and employment guarantee schemes, which exist most times only on paper but are nowhere to be seen on the ground.

And when the government does step in, it is with too little, too late.

For instance, it was only after the local media in Gorakhpur reported last year that a man had died of hunger in the village of Bansgaon, not some remote hamlet, but just 10 kilometres from the town of Dudhi, that Below Poverty Line cards were distributed here. These make 35 kilograms of foodgrain available to the poor at the subsidized rate of Rs 99 every month at government shops. But very few can even manage to put that amount together at one time. Specially in the monsoon and winter months when there is no work anywhere. Villagers tell me that for buying even this quantity of foodgrain, they often have to borrow. Despite a court ruling which allows them to buy the ration in instalments, whenever they have collected a few rupees.

Hunger deaths still make news, but the non-payment of minimum wages to agricultural labour which leads to slow starvation does not. Neither does corruption in the distribution of BPL cards. Even though these are issues which affect the lives of more than 60% of the country’s population.

Had I voiced these concerns in the ordinary way, they would have gone unnoticed. Unfortunately, it now takes something as inhuman as a hunger death to make urban India notice how people fight to survive in the villages. As the media becomes more urban-centric, rural reporting is also expected to comply to the rules of the new game. One of those rules: processes matter less and less; what makes news is a dramatic ‘event’.

 

Dantewada, Chattisgarh: As we walk through a village haat, the economic lifeline of the adivasis, we see how much out of sync they still are with the modern world of the currency system or metric measures – so much so that they are easily fleeced. Through the year they collect a variety of forest produce, mainly saal seeds, mohuya flower, mango kernels, tendu leaf and gum, trekking long distances to gather it. But when it comes to selling, the same mohuya flowers purchased from them during the early summer months for two rupees a kilogram are resold in the winter at a price six times higher.

The forest is the place where the adivasis feel at home. It is their land which they believe rightfully belongs to them. These trees are their property. But when this wealth comes to the market, once again the adivasis are no match for the clever tactics of the timber merchants.

Each of these 45 timber trees, owned by Krishna, an adivasi from Chargaon, should have fetched at least Rs 35,000 in the market. But he didn’t know that. So he sold 20, for the princely sum of just Rs 1000. If he had access to the timber market he would have made seven lakh rupees.

Krishna, who is not educated tells us, ‘A seth came and said I will do all the paperwork and you sell me the trees. There was a bad drought. I needed the money and could not afford to bribe all the officials to make the papers, and so I sold it to him.’

The papers Krishna talks about are documents which gives him rights over his trees, and which can never be drawn up unless a hefty amount is paid in bribes to various officials. Some sangam sadasyas, the term used for Naxalite sympathizers in the area, informed the authorities and the seth was prevented from carting away the felled trees.

Today Krishna has no trees and no money.

Once again it’s only when an adivasi like Krishna picks up arms and joins either the People’s War Group or the MCC, plants landmines which blow up policemen and state property that the rest of the country wakes up to the Naxalite problem. But the process of deliberate neglect that feeds these uprising has no takers. Because these stories inevitably point out the flaws in the development process which lets mining companies displaces tribals from their land without rehabilitating them, which does not allow them to gather and sell forest produce, as they have done since the beginning. These are reports about people we have forgotten, and remember only when they lash out at us.

Why must the mainstream media only focus on the crisis in agriculture when cotton farmers commit suicide, or on the handloom industry when weavers start selling their children for a few hundred rupees?

 

Today this is one of the toughest challenges facing anyone reporting not just on the times and lives of people in rural India, but also its most marginalized – dalits, adivasis, women and the poor, wherever they are. Of not using violence, death and destruction as crutches to put across their struggle.

However, the truth is that whether it’s the government machinery or the wheels of justice, everything moves so slowly here. That in a business where there is breaking news every minute of the day. To keep these issues alive is almost impossible. Making matters worse, is the tyranny of geography. It is so much easier to sit in a television studio, or attend a press conference by an NGO in the capital. Why invest in sending a reporter for several days into some remote corner of the country to bring pictures of half-naked children suffering from malnutrition? So much easier to sell a fashion show than a poor woman walking miles for a pot of water in a drought affected area. It’s not just a question of television rating points or newspaper circulation figures. It’s an acute reflection of news hierarchies, of setting up a news pyramid in which the marginalised are at the bottom of the scale. It’s almost as if a conscious decision has been made to reflect a ‘metropolitan’ mindset through the news, a mindset which doesn’t want to look at the dark side of India.

Remember the ‘India Shining’ campaign in 2004, and how bedazzled we were with it? It required a sari stampede in which defenceless poor women died for us to be reminded of the darkness that existed only a few miles away from the heart of Lucknow. Journalism is supposed to be a mirror of society. But at the moment, the mirror doesn’t choose to reflect the full picture. Rural reporting has been the immediate casualty of this tendency.

 

Panchmahal district, Gujarat: ‘A strict economic boycott will throttle the Muslims. It will break their backbone. Then it will be difficult for them to live in any part of the country. Friends begin this economic boycott from today...’

Four years year after this VHP pamphlet was distributed all over Gujarat, its message is still being lived out in villages like Pavagarh in South Gujarat’s Panchmahal district. Consequently pilgrims visiting the magnificent Jama Masjid and ancient devi shrine, now eat at food stalls run only by Hindus.

None of the nearly two dozen Muslim establishments burnt down during the riots have been allowed to re-start. Mukhtarbhai who had his own tourist taxi, tells us that when he met the sarpanch and the deputy sarpanch of the village, and said we want to start our business again, they said, ‘ "You can live in the village, but in Pavagarh now only the Hindus will do business." If you want to work you will have to leave. Our jeep-taxis used for ferrying tourists were burnt and now they say no Hindu is allowed to sit in them.’

 

In the village of Delol, 34 Muslim men, women and children were killed in the riots. The rest of the 70 families fled to the safety of Kaalol, a small town six kms away. Only seven people have since returned to the place which was once as much their home as anyone else’s.

Yunus is one of them. In the past his tailoring business flourished because of Hindu customers. Today there are none. ‘Earlier,’ he tells us, ‘my shop used to be full of clothes, but after the riots the Hindus stopped coming to my shop to get their clothes stitched. We only had Hindu customers; Muslims never get clothes made in a shop. They always stitch them at home. Now I get clothes from people in Kaalol and bring them here to stitch.’

‘Then why don’t you stitch them in Kaalol itself,’ we asked.

‘I don’t have the money to set up an establishment there. They ask for a deposit of Rs 50-60,000 for renting a place in Kaalol. Where will I get it from? This is my own shop so I can manage, even if I make a little money.’

Down the road, Sirajuddin Kansara had two cycle repair shops. Both were burnt down, but not the house he lived in because it was rented from a Hindu. After a court order allowed him to reopen his business in one of its rooms, he has been coming to Delol every day for the past one year, but has not stayed back for a single night.

No one speaks to these seven men and women in the village. No one offers them any food or water. But they are determined to earn their living from here. They have no choice, even if fear still stalks them.

And then there are women like Shahnaz who was gang-raped, Medina Sheikh whose daughter was killed in front of her eyes and Zohrabibi whose husband was hacked to death as she watched helplessly, who are still waiting for justice as the men who committed these crimes walk free.

All these women who have decided to risk telling the truth want just one thing – justice. These four years instead of breaking them have given them courage, which they did not even know they possessed – to protect their families, their honour and their right to be equal citizens of India. But for the rest of India, they are invisible.

 

Why is it that reams of newspaper and hours of television programming are devoted to a Jessica Lall, but no one wants to invest the same energy in reporting the stories of Shahnaz, Medina and Zohrabibi? Jessica’s case was an outrage, but is her tragedy any less than these other women? Or is it that it requires a beautiful, glamourous woman (made for television and colour supplements) to be gunned down in a page three party for the media to wake up to the reality of hostile witnesses and a justice system that is horribly skewed in favour of the rich and powerful? What about the fact that ninety-nine per cent of the dalit women who are raped and tortured get no justice from any court, and why does nobody petition the President or take up their cases with the same ferocity?

It would be a real tragedy if the many ‘invisible’ stories are not told by journalists, if rural reporting is reduced to the occasional foray into the heartland, more to reduce the sense of guilt that a news organisation may feel, and less due to any commitment to the real issues that afflict rural India.